We want Simple History to be fast. Simple History is an activity log (audit log) plugin for WordPress — it records what users and plugins do on a site. It runs on over 300,000 websites, and a logging plugin that slows down 300,000 websites would be a pretty bad logging plugin. So we treat performance…
For 13 years we had the same screenshots on our wordpress.org plugin page. The first thing a potential user sees. And it was 13 years old! Also: low resolution. Ouch. But how come it took so long for us to update them? Well, because we are lazy. And updating them was time consuming and boring:…
If you’re building AI-powered tools that read your WordPress activity log — whether it’s a Claude Code skill, a custom GPT, or any LLM-based agent — you’ll want to keep API responses as small as possible. Every extra byte costs tokens, and tokens cost money and context window space. Here are a few tips we…
Simple History shows a quick-view dropdown in the WordPress admin bar, letting logged-in users see recent activity without leaving the page. Since the admin bar loads on every frontend page, keeping this bundle small matters. We discovered that a single import — import { HStack } from ‘@wordpress/components’ — was pulling in wp-components (787 KB)…
A week ago, on a local test website on mine, WooCommerce suddenly got updated. Now this was a bit strange since I do not have auto-update enabled for WooCommerce and I did not perform an update. This is how it looked in the Simple History log. Just like a regular plugin update. I had not…
The Simple History community has been asking for practical examples of how to extend the plugin’s functionality, particularly around forwarding log entries to external systems. Following community feedback in issue #427, we’ve published a dedicated github.com/bonny/simple-history-examples that demonstrates how to do this. What’s in the Examples Repository The new repository at github.com/bonny/simple-history-examples contains a fully…
We have updated the licensing options for each individual Simple History add-on plugin. These new options, available as of yesterday, provide greater flexibility for choosing a plan that fits your specific needs. Overview of the new plans: With these updated licensing options, you can now select the plan that best aligns with the number of…
Simple History 4.14.0 fixes some bugs but also adds a new useful feature: detective mode! Detective Mode is a setting in Simple History that when enabled adds detailed debug information to each logged event. After updating to the latest version of Simple History you can enable The Detective mode can be in settings: More information…
Simple History has an API that makes it possible for plugin developers to add support to their plugins to log to Simple History. Here are 10 plugins 11 plugins (!) that in different ways have support for Simple History. (For the latest list please see this support document.) Update 15 June 2023: We found another…